With the passing of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, it would be no exaggeration to say that India has lost its last Nehruvian politician. This statement may raise the hackles of both the Congress and the BJP faithful. The Congress, because it feels it has a monopoly over Nehru’s legacy, and the BJP because it blames Nehru for all of India’s ills today.
But Vajpayee, despite being a founding member of the BJP and a life-long RSS pracharak , could embody with ease the Nehruvian ethos — one that was embedded in grace, accommodation, political etiquette, sobriety, moderation, self-reflection and a sparkling sense of humour.
A long-time parliamentarian, Vajpayee entered Parliament in 1957 as a Jana Sangh MP, where he made many memorable speeches and participated with vigour in parliamentary debates – another Nehruvian trait.
After spending close to two years in jail during the Emergency Vajpayee entered the government for the first time when he was made Minister for External Affairs in the Janata government between 1977 and 1979. After the Janata experiment collapsed the Jana Sangh morphed into the Bhartiya Janata Party, and Vajpayee was its first President. But even the veteran politician and Parliamentarian had to face defeat in the 1984 general elections, held in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, when the Congress swept to power with close to four-fifths majority.
The middle path
The BJP as a party started gaining momentum only after Vajpayee made way for the more hardline LK Advani, when it hitched its prospects to the Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid bandwagon. It was Advani’s Rath Yatra in late 1990 that made the BJP a serious contender for power at the Centre. It is now well known that Vajpayee, despite his ideological moorings, along with another BJP veteran Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, was not enthusiastic about the Ram Mandir campaign.
And herein lies the irony. After riding to power on a hardline Hindutva plank, the BJP had to fall back on the ‘moderate’ Vajpayee when it came within sniffing distance of power after the 1996 elections. In the 1998 polls, it was Vajpayee’s personality and consensual style of politics that helped the BJP stitch a mega alliance at the Centre. During the first 13-month stint in 1998, Vajpayee came into his own as a leader with two major acts — the Pokhran nuclear blasts in 1998 and the bus ride to Lahore in early 1999 to pursue peace with Pakistan.
The Lahore bus ride, sadly, came to nothing and, soon enough, India and Pakistan were locked in a low-intensity battle in the heights of Kargil. But despite this setback, Vajpayee was steadfast in his commitment to peace with Pakistan, later inviting Gen Parvez Musharraf to a summit in Agra in mid-2001. Even in Kashmir, Vajpayee led the first ever talks with the Hizb-ul-Mujahedeen in the year 2000.
Vajpayee’s biggest achievement was in being the first non-Congress Prime Minister to complete a full term in office and bringing along a disparate set of regional players, which included Mamata Banerjee’s TMC, Navin Patnaik’s BJD, Chandrababu Naidu’s TDP and Karunanidhi’s DMK. He was, in large part, responsible for making the BJP more acceptable across the political spectrum, especially among the regional parties.
Taking reforms forward
In the economic sphere, Vajpayee stayed with the reforms process that PV Narasimha Rao had initiated in 1991 and took it to the next stage, despite the RSS’ carping. The ground work for the Goods and Services Tax, for which both the erstwhile UPA government and the current Modi government claim credit, was laid by Vajpayee, when he appointed the Vijay Kelkar committee to draw up a roadmap for it. Vajpayee gave a fillip to the disinvestment process; in fact, his government even had a separate Ministry of Disinvestment, headed by the then high-profile Arun Shourie. The first two big ticket PSU sell offs — CMC, snapped up by TCS, and IPCL, bagged by Reliance — were spearheaded by the Vajpayee government.
His biggest achievement on infrastructure development, especially road building, was the ₹60,000-crore Golden Quadrilateral programme.
It was under Vajpayee, both in his earlier stint as External Affairs Minister in the 1970s and later as a Prime Minister two decades later, that the Indian cricket team toured Pakistan after a long time.
Vajpayee was a politician who has been described by many as being an enigma. He was, in some ways, a very ‘Indian’ politician. His biggest asset was that he could be both ‘this’ and ‘that’. A liberal who was an RSS pracharak , a moderate who was leader in a hardline Hindu right-wing party. Vajpayee was often said to be ‘the right man in the wrong party’, and this was no lazy political cliché; it had a fair amount of truth in it.
Perhaps ambiguity in a politician is an important quality to have in a country as diverse and fractious as ours. And, in the end, Vajpayee’s success as a politician lay in turning his contradictions and ambiguities into defining qualities.